I heard my favorite raven calls yesterday morning, those round sounds that seem like love talk, like overhearing the quiet morning murmur of two people in bed, their own little bubble, lovers who have been together for a long time talking about the day to come, about last night, people who know how to rest together, how to share peace.
[Spontaneous writing prompt, revised. Words were round and rest.]
doubt |dout|
A wavering of certainty, a wobbling of confidence in the rightness of things. She knew she was doing what needed to be done, but still doubt stalked her, circling her ankles like a cat in the dark.
On Saturday afternoon I run out of sun. So I move my lime green yoga mat to an odd diagonal patch remaining on the walkway to do my chavasana. Even this winter sun warms me where it slants between the liquid amber branches and falls on my legs, my bare feet, my face. For long, quiet moments I surrender to trusting. I think about how lost I’ve let myself get in resisting what is. I don’t berate myself, though. This is hard, I tell myself. No wonder you lost track. This is not the first time this awareness has managed to swim to the top in the last two weeks. I know it might sink to the bottom again. But wouldn’t it be sweet if I could just find my way to trusting this now and its unfolding? Wouldn’t it be dear to just let joy and sweetness arise again and again and again?
Between. Between this moment and the next one. Between what is making me angry and what will come when the anger is gone. We have this bounty of moments, this never-ending chance to begin again. And again and again. When I am failing it means I fail over and over, minutes apart. But I never forget I get to try again in the next moment.
I suspect there may be a kind of science to becoming whole—to moving toward healing, through healing, toward the me I want to be more often. Just like I believe there can be a way to write an essay that is a little bit like doing math, and not in a restrictive way, but in building it by pieces, using a structure for discovery that can become a kind of scaffold we hang things on. And things come because there is a scaffold waiting for them. Sometimes for me this process, this psuedo science, is about breathing, or about beginning again and again. Sometimes I make a sound, tiny and dear, that comes from some secret core of me, and I hear the love and the tenderness the sound is sending me.
[Editor’s note: piece from our spontaneous writing group—the words we had were breathing, beginning, science and sound.]
I am on Zoom. Three people in a row say how thrilled they are at the progress we are making here in the United States, the protests, knowing black lives matter. I can feel their buoyancy. I sit still, stunned, uncomfortable in my skin because I feel so far away from them, on the other side of the world, on another planet. I am terrified, angry, anxious. Hopeful, yes—but nowhere near being able to touch “thrilled.” Later, I wonder if I was judging their excitement, naming it naïveté without knowing I was. Or was it only that while I believed in the promise of the protests I could not trust they would lead to real change? Or maybe I only need to be able to embrace the good when it comes, more readily, more fully than I do? Or maybe the distance and discomfort I felt was only because I live in all the shades of gray.
Hope is elusive. I have to remind myself I do not believe it is too late for us to save the world. Before, I used to know. I used to remember. Today I whisper hope, for me, for all of us. May we let the world crumble around us, trusting we can put it back together again—different, better, more fair, more everything for everyone.
